Compress elision mark?

In the example below, lyric space is at a premium, and I need to make the elision mark a little more compact.

Is there a way to do this? I search for it in the Music Symbol editor, but I couldn’t find anything.

If I remember correctly we’re actually drawing elision slurs using actual slurs, and I don’t think we have any options for them at the moment. I’ll make a note that we might add some in future.

Thanks Daniel.

You could use a narrow space (see Unicode spaces) to separate the words (a Hair Space will give ‘the o’) and then use or misuse another symbol as Shift-X text to indicate the liaison. The Undertie ‿ (U+203F) is the usual symbol for this but you could use something as narrow as a Breve ˘ (U+02D8) if necessary.

Obviously this isn’t ideal though and life would be easier if one could edit the tracking.

Thanks, I’ll try that!

I was sure this option has been added, but I can’t find it. Search returned nothing. Is it possible to compress these now?

https://steinberg.help/dorico_pro/v4/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_lyrics/notation_reference_lyrics_east_asian_elision_slurs_c.html?hl=elision

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Oh, duh. It was staring me right in the face. Thanks.

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One thing I hope we will one day be able to do is add the elision symbol underneath a non-breaking syllable or in the middle of a word. There are times when that is needed too. A lot of old English hymn texts from the 1700’s have aggressively contracted words, or require single-syllabification (powers vs. pow-ers) Indicating such instances with an elision underneath is useful in some cases. (And yes, in this case, it could be pow’rs, but I can’t think of a different example at the moment.)

Now that we have the Edit Single Lyric feature, it is already possible to add the elision symbol in the middle of a word:

Image

The undertie (U+203F) was put in the middle of the word powers, and the lyric was edited using a combination of letter spacing, font stretch and baseline shift.

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For all that effort I’m just better off dragging a little curve out by hand in affinity publisher!

But I’m grateful you’ve proved it’s possible, although it’s kludgy to be sure.

Easier: create a character style for those cases!

Why would you make it confusing for the amateur singer? pow’rs is correct.

Hot take: these sorts of forced contractions are ugly and only used when absolutely necessary.

I’m looking at you, ev’ry.

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If I had a nickel for ev’ry time I had to…

I can tell you never lived through the Eighteenth century.

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Guilty as charged!!

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Again, why make it confusing for singers? They know how to sing pow’rs. In over 50 years of choral, music theater and opera directing, I don’t ever remember being asked about that. You would not want to hear my explanation to my choirs for that underscore nonsense in the middle of a word.

Your cleverness does not trump my need to keep it simple.

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Mike, plenty of old editions do this, requiring exact duplication if that’s the nature of the job, so that’s a bit of a non sequiter.

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And as I said above, that was just one word that came to mind at the time. There are other words that are less straightforward and do not have nearly as established a tradition of contraction as “pow’rs” (which is very common in English hymnody).